Pup4DOS is designed to boot Puppy Linux from a DOS-based system (including Windows ME, 98, 95, 3.1 and earlier) with a DOS boot loader that doesn't change boot sectors or MBRs or affect other boot loaders. No boot floppy or even config.sys and autoexec.bat needed! Actually nothing but plain DOS in memory (real mode) is preferred to avoid conflicts. Instead of using a new boot menu, for example, you would use Windows 98's boot menu to go to "Safe Mode Command Prompt" and then type "puppy" and press [Enter] to boot Puppy.

There are ultra simple instructions for the normal IDE drive install and advanced info on how to configure Pup4DOS, better archive your personal data, easily manage multiple Puppy versions and addon files, and other customizations with Pup4DOS, DOS, and Puppy on a FAT32 (vfat) partition. The contents of BootParams are included along with instructions on how to edit the boot parameters.

Pup4DOS is basically a DOS batch file, a DOS boot loader (Gujin's tiny.exe and/or LinLd), a file organization scheme, some archival tools (Info-ZIP), and supporting documentation. Getting started with Pup4DOS assumes you already have your drive partitioned, formatted, and bootable to a DOS prompt. If you need a version of DOS, then install FreeDOS. Extracting the core Puppy files from the CD image (ISO) or the Puppy CD/DVD itself is also needed. More is planned to come for better flexibility and user-friendliness. Check here or check with J_Rey for the latest.

To get started with Pup4DOS, download the latest file from the links below, extract the archived PUPPY folder to what DOS would see as C:\ (i.e. to end up with C:\PUPPY) and read the included PUP4DOS.TXT file for install instructions. Don't forget to download the latest Puppy CD image to extract the core Puppy files from.